Poetry and Meditation

Catalog description

Can a metaphor speak to you when the mind is still? Can poetry in a text move us to experience and unfold poetry beyond the text? In this course, we will explore the poetic experience, which can manifest in various ways as a deeply personal moment of revelation - a means of accessing a unique "truth" through a particular state of mind. According to the philosopher María Zambrano, these moments have the power to uncover the essence of things, capturing the "real," understood as the experiential, pre-cognitive realm that exists beyond structured thought. We will not only study the philosophical ideas behind this approach, but also put them into practice, using meditation techniques drawn from the yogic tradition. These practices will be applied to major poems from the Iberian and Latin American worlds, including works by Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, and others.